ANGEL Tip – This tip probably comes a little late for those of you teaching this summer (sorry about that) but hopefully it is something that can help you in the future. In the Gradebook of ANGEL there is a setting which can change all assignments that have no grades to zeros. While this is typically not something you want to switch on for the entire semester (it tends to make the students nervous to be failing most of the semester) it does come in handy on that last day after everything has been graded so you don’t have to manually go through and zero assignments that weren’t turned in. To turn on this option, do the following:

Go to the Manage tab

Click the Gradebook link (first column, first link)

Click the Preferences link (first column, middle)

Check the first check box, which should read “Treat Ungraded Items as Zero”

Click the Save button

Note: If you copy the course from semester to semester, after you copy it to the new semester, check to make sure this setting is turned back off.

Yesterday’s announcement about my new email address sparked a conversation about how to remove an old email address from Mozilla Thunderbird’s address book. By default, Thunderbird collects the addresses of anyone you send an email to and saves them so you can easily send an email to them again later. This is great until someone changes their email address or you don’t want them to show up in auto-fill suggestions anymore. To remove someone from the automatically collected addresses, try the following:

Click the Address Book button at the top of Thunderbird (next to the Write button)

Click on Collected Addresses on the left side of the window

In the Search box at the top right, type in the name of the person you want to remove

Select the appropriate search result

Click the Delete button

Close the Address Book window

Did you know?… When in Thunderbird, you can press Ctrl+N or Ctrl+M to create a new email and Ctrl+Enter to send it.

I thought I would add a short and fun post on technology. See the graph below (I got it from the NY Times). It’s pretty amazing if you think about how much our world has changed since our parents and their parents were born. To help consider these changes, I added a few lines which show around when my grandparents were born along with my parents, me and my kids. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions. Click on the image to see a larger view.